Jewel to ALASKA---6/13-6/20

[vegasviolist87]

Hello ALL!

 

I was more of a lurker on here prior to my cruise but I found great information and a lot of questions were answered because of the great reviews. So I suppose it's time to pay it forward.

 

A little bit of a background on us. We are couple in our late 20's/early 30's that love to travel whenever we get the chance. I work full time and go to school full time, I plan our vacations for the end of my semesters so that I have something to look forward to. My DH works and takes care of our girls because I'm almost quite literally never home. This trip was for us as a couple to reconnect and getaway from our world, leaving the girls with grandparents.

 

Ship

We sailed on the Jewel. She's in great shape! We enjoyed walking around the promenade on Deck 7. We loved all the lounges and bars that we could hang out at. We had stateroom 4576, a porthole on the lowest deck. I really enjoyed the room. I loved being close to the water and hearing the waves as we sailed. However, if I did Alaska over again, I would most definitely get a balcony stateroom. I hated not having a private space when we went through Tracy Arm Fjord and viewing Sawyer Glacier.

 

Dining

We ate many of the places on board including Teppanyaki and Cagney's. The service was always fast and polite. We enjoyed most of our meals. The food was good but I would not say it was exceptional. When we did the teppanyaki, we were the only ones with reservations. So we enjoyed a private dining experience with the chef giving us so much food!

 

UBP. We had booked our cruise with the UBP promo in February. We actually cancelled our cruise with another cruise line because of this promotion. For us, it was worth it. We never had to wait for drinks at the bars. We definitely saved money with this promotion.

 

Shows/Entertainment

I really enjoyed all the shows that we saw on board. My favorite was when the production singers did an intimate show of all their favorite Broadway songs. I'm a sucker for Broadway, I love musicals. I was even impressed with their version of Cirque. I've seen all the Cirque du Soleil shows in Las Vegas multiple times, and I was worried that their version wouldn't be impressive but I'm glad I was wrong. They used their small space well and the performers were pretty incredible.

 

They also had many audience participation games, that were a lot of fun. Many times I would walk away with my stomach hurting from laughing so much! I'm not the type to volunteer for these things, but it is awesome to go and get a good laugh because you never know what will happen.

 

Service

Service everywhere was great! From the guest services desk, to our room steward, to the bartenders, cocktail servers, etc. These people work 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week and they do it with a smile! Always very helpful and always so kind. We ran into an issue where something was charged to our room that we did not purchase. We went down to the guest services desk as soon as we realized it. They printed the receipt of what was purchased and we confirmed we had not purchased it. They wanted to pull the receipts to confirm the signatures did not match from our other receipts and the needed some time to do it. We got an answer the next morning, they confirmed that a mistake had been made, and it was taken off our bill.

 

Shore Excursions

We took 2 excursions, neither of which we booked with NCL. First we did kayaking in Ketchikan. We booked with Southeast Sea Kayaks. I found them on Trip Advisor. I liked that they offered trips of only 6 kayaks at a time. On our tour we only had 2 kayaks (3 people + guide). Our tour guide Ryan was an amazing wealth of information and showed us some great things. We ended up seeing orcas, jellyfish, starfish, and bald eagles. We learned a lot about the vegetation too. We really enjoyed our time with him.

 

The second tour we took was a whale watching, Mendenhall Glacier, and Salmon Bake excursion. This one we booked when we got off the ship in Juneau. We got off the ship pretty early and took the shuttle to town from the ship. They dropped us off at Mt. Robert's Tramway. There was a lot of vendors there that were making reservations. Originally we were going to take the shuttle to Mendenhall Glacier, but I was also interested in whale watching. This guy gave us an offer we couldn't refuse. It included 2 hours of whale watching on a ship that only had about 18-20 people, an hour at Mendenhall Glacier, and lunch at the Gold Klondike Salmon Bake. If we had booked this tour with the cruise it would have been $230 per person, we got it for $130 per person. I know with a discount like that you all are thinking, was it a good company? YES! It was Alaska Travel Adventures. They had a naturalist on board the whale watching ship that had worked for the state of Alaska as a marine biologist. He was a great wealth of information. The boat captain was funny and great too. At Mendenhall, it wasn't guided but we were given an hour of time to explore. We took the 2 mile roundtrip walk that took us close to the glacier and nugget falls. It was really beautiful there. The salmon bake was great food. We didn't have a lot of time here but it seemed like there was more to explore than just the food.

 

Other General Info

 

We flew in from Las Vegas the same day as the cruise. I would only recommend this if you have a short flight and know that there are many flights a day to Seattle from your airport. We took the first flight of the day but should something have happened there were other flights that we could have gotten on to get there in time.

 

We also had a car service reserved prior to our arrival in Seattle. We had booked through Shuttle Express (I believe). It was really nice to have the driver waiting for us at baggage claim. We didn't have to deal with finding a taxi/shuttle/other transportation. It was nice to have that little extra bit of service for not that much more cost.

 

Embarkation/Debarkation was super easy. It only took about 30 mins from getting dropped off at Pier 66 to getting on the ship. Debarkation was even easier. We literally walked off the ship and through customs. No lines, no waiting. I don't know if this is typical, but we didn't even have to show ID through customs at the end. We handed the guy our declaration and we walked right on through.

 

 

All in all, we had a great time and we would take that cruise again. We have no complaints.

[landlady1952]

Thank you for great review. We are on Jewel Aug 1st. First time for us on Jewel and to Alaska. Glad to hear you had a good experience.